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How has social media affected marketing automation?
What is your opinion on marketing automation trends in the wake of social media? How has the industry adapted?
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3 Answers
In my opinion, social media is the place where marketing automation is decreasing. Like any other marketing channel, some people try to automate the Social Media channel - I mean, you can use tools like twitterfeed, or HootSuite to send out Tweets, Facebook updates, etc., at regular intervals. But social media is exactly the place where automation fails, and I think a large number of companies are beginning to get the point.
Social media is where you interact directly with the customer. It's a two-sided conversation, and you can't automate that. Well, you can, but it's not hard to spot :). You can (and probably should) automate the first touch with a customer - that first Tweet, begin a LinkedIn discussion, even ask a question on Focus - but as soon as a conversation starts to take place, as soon as the 'social' bit kicks in, you have to be a person. You can't automate that.
And that, I think, is what people respond to the best. The fact that they are having a real conversation with the company they bought from, or the business they invested in.
Great question. I would agree that you can't "automate" social media, but I've always found the term "marketing automation" to be a terrible name for the space (but it's stuck, so we'll go with it). To me, marketing automation is mainly about understanding the buyers and their interests so you can react appropriately and accordingly, whether it's getting them in front of sales (via lead scoring) or communicating with them differently (via lead nurturing).
What we're doing in social (I'm with Eloqua) is to build in an understanding of a buyer as they visit content from a social source - a Focus discussion, a Tweet, an industry blog, etc. As that drives them to a specific page of content on your site it provides insight into them as a buyer. This is extremely valuable for lead scoring, nurturing, etc.
I agree with Steve. Marketing Automation has come to mean too many things to too many people. Marketing automation is a means of ensure a consistent response to a given stimulus. It is a machine. A campaign has campaign rules that need to the consistently executed in order to provide quality customer service. A service that should, in my opinion, include a means of communicating with a live person as appropriate. There are always exceptions to the rule!
The constraint in defining a quality marketing process is the ease of use and the flexibility of the rules engine. Can the marketer define the appropriate actions in response to customer events? Give the marketer this flexibility, unimpeded by the need for extensive training or IT support, and then you will have true marketing automation.
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